a look at writing, marketing & the mindset to improve your skills in both.

Success is something that comes to all of us at least once in life. You could argue that even being born into this world is a form of success. However, the counterbalance to success is failure. On a long enough life-span, failure is inevitable. Not taking any chances in life for a fear of failing, is failure in itself. Failure is life's default setting. Either you succeed or you fail. For many of us, the setbacks in life (be they financial, academic, relational or otherwise) begin to shape our opinion on how far we can go. Too often, the temptation is there to take these experiences and allow them to influence our idea of what our potential really is. We see the brilliant, innovative, successful people and assume that from a very young age, they had 'the gift' and were recognised for this. We take inventory of our own lives and think to ourselves: If only we could have been born with that persons' "gift", how much easier our path would have been, how much greater our current life situation would be. The problem with basing our own efforts at sowing seeds, toiling away under the daily heat, is that we look at the abundance of other people's crops and and assume that the end result was always clearly inevitable. Perhaps if we took a closer look and spoke to these people, however, their own stories might sound eerily similar to ours:

What took these people on their journey to greatness? How did they manage to differentiate themselves from those who only enjoyed sporadic success? Why is it that some people seem to be "lucky" while other people can't get a good break to save their lives? What is the answer to this?

Consistency.

Consistency is sticking to your ultimate goal, even if failure trips you up. Consistency means trying to be your best every day. Consistency is not being content with just one success then laying back. Consistency is enjoying success so much that you do everything to make it happen in your life regularly. Consistency is the realisation that continually backing up on your efforts is what will bring you more frequent success. Consistency is putting to rest an overbearing fear of failure, because you realise that failure is inevitable. Consistency is realising (and acting upon the realisation) that your personal success will not be characterised by your failures, but by what you do between those failures. Consistency is what leads to continued improvement. On a long enough time scale, it is what distinguishes you from the others. Consistency is what transforms failures from major flaws to minor footnotes in the CV of your life:

Even a great like Michael Jordan didn't suddenly begin sinking three-point shots with ease on a constant basis. He knew that in order to become a frequent winner, he had to accept that he would also frequently fail, no matter how "great" he was ever to become. Yet in spite of all his failures, his fans and those who take any interest in basketball (or sport, for that matter) only think of success when his name is mentioned. The reason? Consistency.

If you seek frequent success, first you must seek after consistency. Doing a great job one day each week means little if, for the other 6 days of your week, you are poor or mediocre. Consistency means that you aim to be great every day of the week. You will fail to meet this standard plenty of times. But as long as you seek to be consistently great, soon enough you will go from being great just one day of the week to two days of the week. As long as you keep working at it and focusing on your ultimate goals when failure trips you up, soon enough you will be great 3 days of an average week. Before you know it, that continued effort will bring you 4 days of greatness- or more. People will begin to notice the minimum amount of days where you are below-par, and define you by the majority of days where you are great and steadily improving.

In your personal life, in your business, in your aspirations, ask yourself what it is you truly seek? Then seek to consistently aim for this, no matter what else. You might just find that your vision is much closer than you initially thought...